by Jon Land
Wareagle had leaned over the stinking pile of the corpses’ insides. Blaine drew up even with him, while the chief and Tupi warriors kept their distance.
“What about tracks?”
Wareagle was on his knees now, sliding his callused palms across the ground. “Nothing from the time of these killings. Much from after.”
“I’m listening.”
“Seven men wearing U.S. combat boots.”
“Norseman,” Blaine muttered. “Ben and his goons must have come in to hunt something down.” He looked at Wareagle. “Our Spirit of the Dead maybe.”
Wareagle looked up. “The Green Coats came in from the northeast. I can follow their tracks. They may bring us closer to what we have come to find.”
McCracken gazed up at the last of the day’s light. “Not without sun. We’ll spend the night with the Tupis, help them make their stand, and leave come morning.”
“Something might come before that.”
“Save us a trip, Indian.”
Chapter 7
THE TUPI WARRIORS patrolled the valley’s perimeter in positions shown them by Wareagle. Blaine hung back through it all; not yet fully accepted by the Tupis, he focused his energies in other directions. Perimeter guards out of contact with one another were too vulnerable to attack, too easy to eliminate one at a time, so Wareagle’s plan had them patrolling in concentric circles that meant one brave would pass another every hundred yards. Still, this left too many easily breached holes in the perimeter. Hell, just the night before the Spirit of the Dead, as the Tupis called it, had made off with two boys without leaving any trace. Couldn’t dare leave it any opening at all in view of that.
What the braves needed was a good set of walkie-talkies. Lacking that, Blaine would have to make do with what was available. He glanced at the tribal chief, still seated in the center of the valley, a small fire burning before him. McCracken smiled.
Thirty minutes later fourteen fires were going around the rim of the valley. Every three minutes the braves tending them would drop a special ash made from tree bark into the flames to produce a noxious white smoke. The white smoke would serve as the all’s-well signal to the spotters in the valley. A missed interval would spell trouble, and the tribe would know where to concentrate their forces.
Wareagle paced into the black hours of the morning. The jungle was louder then; animal and bird sounds seemed to travel farther in the darkness. Blaine approached him with the pump action propped on his shoulder. Johnny regarded the weapon with apparent disdain.
“Come on, Indian, whatever this Spirit of the Dead turns out to be, it’s not bulletproof.”
“But neither does it fear that bullets can stop it.”
McCracken sniffed the air. Maybe, just maybe, a new scent sifted through. The beginnings of something rancid and spoiled. He shook his imagination away.
“We’ve been through this before.”
“Not the hellfire, Blainey.”
“Why not? Guns didn’t always work against Charlie, either. Waving that big M-16 made you feel invincible until you stepped on a mine or a trap or got hit when one of them popped out of a tunnel.”
“The Black Hearts did what they had to. What we are facing here does what it likes.”
McCracken had to bring up what had forced its way into his mind. “You felt something else back where we found those boys, Indian. You didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell.”
Wareagle smiled. “Perhaps it is you the spirits have chosen to speak through this time.”
“I’d welcome anything that helps get us out of here alive, including the whole truth of what you know.”
“Feel, Blainey.”
“Same thing, Indian.”
Bursts of white smoke filled the air along the rim of the valley as another three-minute interval passed.
“The Spirit of the Dead enjoys what it does,” Wareagle told him softly. “It is propelled by a need to kill like an animal that will starve if it doesn’t hunt. The pain and suffering of its victims are its food.”
“Then we’d better find it before it finds us.”
“The daytime belongs to us.”
“So long as we make it through the night.”
McCracken half expected Wareagle to return from a sweep of the perimeter at dawn with a report that all the Tupi braves had been killed during the final three-minute interval. But the look on the big Indian’s face told him all was well.
“The night passed without incident,” he reported. “No sign of the Spirit of the Dead, Blainey, but evidence of the Green Coats was found to the south of us.”
“Norseman?”
“Still seven men, heavily weighed down by equipment and gear. They could have entered the valley at anytime, but chose not to, almost as if, as if…”
“As if what?”
“They saw the valley as a trap.”
“To catch what, Indian? Seems pretty obvious now they’re after the same thing we are. The question is why.”
“The answer may lie only in following the trail they have left us.”
For the better part of the morning, Johnny followed the trail the soldiers had taken from the north through the jungle. The sticky heat of the afternoon sun was just beginning to make itself felt when Johnny stopped and stood pole straight. Blaine could feel the Indian’s energy emanating outward like a strobe light, pins and needles dancing about his flesh and turning into daggers as they took to the air.
“What’s wrong, Johnny?”
No reply.
“Johnny?”
Silence.
“Johnny…”
Wareagle turned. “We’re close, Blainey. There’s something up there, beyond those trees.”
They started on again, Johnny moving like a big jungle cat. Where he walked, Blaine figured, there would be no trail, either. Johnny parted a huge thicket of overbrush and waited for Blaine to draw even. McCracken looked where Johnny was pointing and found himself gazing at the impossible.
There, in the thick of the jungle, was a massive building!
Just as quickly as his eyes had focused on the structure, it fluttered from his vision like a mirage in the desert, thanks to its sloping construction and shading. The lines and colors flowed perfectly with the jungle, as if construction had been carried out without disturbing a single tree or bush. Johnny led the way closer; a tall steel-link fence came into focus, camouflaged with brush that virtually swallowed it. None of this belonged here, yet here, undeniably, it was. Perhaps it held the answer to whatever was happening in the jungle.
McCracken looked at Wareagle. “What is this place, Indian?”
“I feel death, Blainey—more terrible than even you and I have experienced. We lived in the hellfire, and it lived in us. The land retained its life in spite of the death we brought to it. But what lies before us is nothing but black, a charred symbol on the crest of man.”
“You’re saying this is some kind of scientific installation?”
Wareagle looked at him. “The birthplace of the Spirit of the Dead.”
Blaine could feel Wareagle’s tension growing. “What’s wrong, Johnny?”
“No one is watching for us. There should be guards, but there are none anywhere.”
“If Norseman’s down here, he’s in charge. We’ll ask him about the oversight when we get the chance.”
Johnny stepped through the parted overbrush. “Walk lightly, Blainey. Follow my every step.”
McCracken did just that. They reached the steel fence; Johnny followed until he came to a gate. The lock was missing. The gate shifted slightly in the breeze. McCracken steadied his Remington pump.
They slid into a courtyard. On the uphill grade that led to the building, McCracken expected guards to lunge out at every turn. But Johnny’s stoic stance ahead of him proved no one was on patrol in the area.
The courtyard ended at a set of rock steps chiseled into the hillside. The structure itself had been painted a bland shade of olive and was tota
lly absorbed by the tangle of flora growing about and partially enveloping it. Finding such a perfect spot must have been difficult.
At the installation’s main entrance, Blaine’s eyes were drawn immediately to the dual cameras mounted over the door. The cameras did not move as they should have to follow their progress. The big Indian worked the latch. It gave, but the door resisted opening. A hefty shove forced it in far enough for them to enter.
Halfway inside it became clear what had been blocking then-way. A guard’s body had been propped against the door. His dead hand still gripped a machine gun. Blood drenched his midsection and the floor beneath him.
“Dead about eighteen hours,” Blaine said after inspecting the body. “A day at the outside.”
“He died barring the door, Blainey.”
Blaine observed the trail of blood that ran down a dimly lit corridor. “But he was killed inside.”
“Let’s head on,” Johnny said.
They walked side by side. The first door they came to was a monitoring station that served as the broadcast point for the many video cameras placed inside and out. Beneath the darkened monitors lay the bodies of three men in the same olive uniforms as the guard. They weren’t armed, but had been killed in a similarly messy fashion. McCracken had the same feeling here that had struck him the day before when he and Johnny had come upon the bodies of the two Tupi boys. He backed out of the monitoring room ahead of Wareagle.
In silence the two of them continued on their way. The narrow corridor gave way to a wider one. Four bodies in bloodied white lab coats lay crumpled at irregular intervals. Wareagle hesitated over the first; his face showed revulsion. Blaine could see it was a woman and got close enough to see something else.
Her face had been torn apart.
“Mother of God, Johnny! What the hell did this?”
Wareagle gave no answer. He continued on to an open door from which a burning smell emanated. McCracken followed him inside what had been a conference room. Its chairs had been upended to clear a space in the middle of a floor now covered with embers and ruined tile. Against one wall a series of file cabinets lay tipped over and emptied. Obviously their former contents had fueled the flames. McCracken noticed the blackened edge of a page fragment wedged beneath one of the fallen chairs and retrieved it while Johnny surveyed the rest of the damage.
“Anything, Blainey?” he asked. Blaine held the page up to the room’s single emergency light. “Too badly damaged to lift anything off. Except…Wait a minute…There is something. Not much, but…”
He was able to trace four bolder letters at the edge of the page, all that had not been lost to the fire. O-M-I-C.
“Mean anything to you, Blainey?” Wareagle asked from behind him.
“Not a fucking thing, Indian.”
They checked the room thoroughly, but could find no further fragments. Whoever had hit the complex had been thorough. Since the hit had come from the inside, though, the victims had quite obviously known their killers. He thought of Ben Norseman, wondering if for some reason this had been his work. This might not have been even Ben’s style, but there was no other logical explanation.
“I can’t believe Ben Norseman and his men would do something like this, Indian.”
“I don’t believe they did, Blainey. Outside the installation, their tracks indicated they returned here after the massacre, and they went out again.”
McCracken put it together in his mind.” After whatever was responsible, a trail that took them to the area of the Tupi camp before we made our appearance yesterday.”
“The camp was the Green Coats’ trap, Blainey, just as we suspected.”
“Only whatever was behind this massacre didn’t go for it.”
Wareagle’s stare grew distant. “The people here were killed from within,” he said.
“By what, Johnny?”
“Perhaps the installation can still tell us.”
They proceeded on in their investigation of the facility, but everywhere the results were the same. Equipment smashed. Hallways, rooms, and labs littered with bodies. The killing had been carried out with brutal efficiency, no one spared, no mercy given.
Wareagle looked to the walls as if they might provide some explanation. “The dead feeling present in the forest is strongest in the steps we have followed. It started here and spread outward.”
“Then there’s something we can be sure of, Johnny. To take all these people out so quickly and systematically, there had to be more than one of these Spirits of the Dead, whatever they turn out to be.” His eyes bulged in realization. “Meanwhile, Norseman must still be after them. Seven Green Berets armed to the teeth who eat nails for breakfast.” McCracken looked at his Remington. “Better shape than we’re in.”
“This complex would have been in better shape, too.”
Close scrutiny of a rear wall revealed to McCracken a hidden door behind which were stairs descending into the bowels of the complex. The air instantly felt chillier, and Blaine imagined a breeze sifting by him as he and Wareagle headed down. The lighting here was brighter, and the first door on the right was open. It led into an office of some kind. The remnants of a paper shredder’s work had overflowed from a trash can. Filing cabinet drawers were open down here as well. They had been yanked out and completely rifled.
“Looks like somebody was busy on this level, too, Indian. Destroying everything, by the looks of it.”
“Not everything, Blainey,” Wareagle said as one of his massive hands emerged from the depths of the shredder bin with a partially mangled leather report cover.
He showed it to Blaine so the title was clearly visible: THE OMICRON PROJECT.
McCracken recalled the letters O-M-I-C from the fragment on the floor above. Omicron, the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Slightly distracted now, he followed Wareagle onward. The next series of rooms all housed medical laboratories that still smelled faintly of alcohol. It was almost a refreshing scent, considering what they had been exposed to in the complex thus far. Lab bottles and test tubes lay in pieces everywhere, and they found another five corpses covered with debris. The glass doors of locked cabinets had been smashed, and their contents coated the floor with a carpet of slivers. The remains of needles could be seen, along with shards of thicker containers.
The final door on the hall led into what appeared to be a surgical unit. Much of the equipment in here had proved too bulky to destroy; what remained was a collection of machines of a sort Blaine had never seen before. “Imagers, I think,” he said, fingering one. “Used during microsurgery and for diagnosis.”
There were standard X-ray and CAT scan equipment as well, along with an operating table that was bolted to the floor. Dangling from all four of its sides were leather straps used to tie a patient down.
“Looks like the Omicron Project involved some pretty heavy medical R and D,” said McCracken. “Using human subjects.”
“Or what used to be human.”
“The only thing we know for sure about them is they’re gone. Let’s check out the next floor.”
They found the door at the end of this corridor to be different than the others: ten-inch slab steel with an electronic locking mechanism. The door had been opened and the mechanism shorted out to keep it that way. The air grew still colder as they descended to the complex’s second underground level. The corridor here was slightly shorter, and six doors thinly spaced apart opened on either side, with an equal number closed.
Blaine and Johnny’s inspection found them to be identical in every way: windowless cubicles complete with bed, chair, desk, and bureau. Joined to the near wall of each was a closet-sized bathroom. The door was of six-inch steel, with triple-thick hinges and an electronic locking mechanism. At ceiling level on the far wall was the protruding tip of a video surveillance lens.
“Not a great place to bring a date, under the circumstances,” said Blaine.
At the other end of the corridor rose another steel security door, this one fea
turing a thick glass slab at eye level.
“One-way glass,” Blaine said when he got there.
He pressed his eyes against the cold surface and peered through. It was a room much like the others, except it was bigger. The mattress had been shredded, the bed frame pulled apart at the joints, and the chest of drawers smashed into splinters. Blaine backed away so Johnny could get a better look, but even without the Indian’s spirits there to tell him, Blaine had the feeling that what had happened in the complex had started right here, behind this final door.
McCracken felt a tremor of fear pass through him. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation and sometimes was even welcome. But this time it lingered long enough to become distressing. He had the urge to find a radio and call for help, even though he knew the communications equipment would surely have been trashed.
“Forget the Spirit of the Dead,” he said to Johnny. “Looks like your friends the Tupis were up against a tribe of spirits.”
“Wakinyan is the Sioux word for them, Blainey.”
“Meaning?”
“Thunder beings, as savage as the storm itself. Merciless and indestructible.”
“Let’s hope not.”
Chapter 8
TUESDAY’S DUSK WAS barely three hours away when Blaine and Johnny emerged from the death-filled complex. In all they had found twenty-eight bodies, and even McCracken found himself shaking slightly.
“We must go, Blainey,” Wareagle announced, gazing ahead as if to sniff the air.
“Are you on their trail, Indian?”
“Yes and no.”
“No riddles. Please.”
“The only trail I can find is Norseman’s. Following it will take us to what we seek.”
Two miles back into the jungle, Wareagle crouched down and began working his fingers in the dirt. “Norseman?” Blaine asked.
“There’s more. Now part of another trail separate from his team’s. Fresher.”
“You’re saying he’s being followed?”
“Doubled back on is more like it.”
“How many?” McCracken asked, thinking of the dozen empty beds plus one they had found at the complex.